Oishei Foundation gives $5 million to UB for School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences’ new building

Oishei Foundation gives $5 million to UB for School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences’ new building

HOK, a global design, architecture, engineering and planning firm's design rendering of the future UB medical school. At more than a half-million gross square feet, the steel-framed building will be one of the largest constructed in Buffalo in decades.

HOK's rendering of what laboratory space will look like in the new medical school

“The academic health center will offer unprecedented clinical, research and educational opportunities for our faculty and students. It also will help improve the health of people who live in Western New York and beyond.”

Michael Cain, MD, vice president for health sciences and dean of the medical school

University at Buffalo

Buffalo, N.Y.—The John R. Oishei Foundation has made a
gift of $5 million to the University at Buffalo to support
construction of the new UB School of Medicine and Biomedical
Sciences building on the Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus.

The Oishei Foundation gift provides a significant boost to
UB’s plans to construct a state-of-the art medical
school and equip it with the best medical technologies, labs
and classrooms to be used in the education and training of
physicians.

Construction of the $375 million medical school is scheduled to
be completed in 2016, funded by private philanthropy and state
support, including funding provided by Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo through
the NYSUNY 2020 legislation.

A new UB medical school in downtown Buffalo will provide the
region with a true academic health center, allowing UB and its
hospital partners to work in close proximity and collaboratively to
transform Buffalo into an international destination for the best
medical research, education and patient care.

Oishei Foundation Board Chair James Wadsworth views the effort
as a vehicle for regional development and revitalization.

“The new medical school will strengthen the campus,
generate regional economic growth and help to renew downtown
Buffalo’s urban vitality,” stated Wadsworth.

Oishei Foundation President Robert D. Gioia said the
foundation’s support signals its belief in what the new
medical school means for the future of the region.

“The Oishei Foundation recognizes the new UB medical
school as a game-changing addition to the Buffalo Niagara Medical
Campus. It will redefine our region as a hub for the very best in
health care,” Gioia said. “With this gift, we
join UB as fellow catalysts for change that will dramatically
enhance our community’s economic vitality and quality of
life.”

UB President Satish K. Tripathi said the university is proud to
continue partnering with the Oishei Foundation, a prominent leader
in philanthropy and regional development collaborations in Western
New York.

“We thank the Oishei Foundation for its generous gift and
look forward to working with the foundation to establish Buffalo as
an academic health center and a top health-care destination,”
Tripathi said. “Throughout its history, the foundation has
consistently invested in improving education and health care, and
this gift does both. This gift will have a profound impact on this
priority project for our university.”

Michael Cain, UB vice president for health sciences and dean of
the medical school, welcomed the Oishei Foundation’s
participation in “shaping a bold era of progress, discovery
and promise for the medical school.”

“This important gift will accelerate creation of the
region’s first and only academic health center,” said
Cain, noting that such centers typically consist of a medical
school, a faculty practice, teaching hospitals, a significant
research enterprise and one or more clinical centers of
excellence.

“The academic health center will offer unprecedented
clinical, research and educational opportunities for our faculty
and students,” he said. “It also will help improve the
health of people who live in Western New York and beyond, as
Buffalo develops into a destination for innovative approaches to
clinical care and treatment.”

Nancy H. Nielsen, MD, PhD, senior associate dean for health
policy at the medical school, stressed that private philanthropy is
key to completing the new facility, for which the school is raising
$50 million in private funds.

“Private donations are important to the success of the new
medical school, and we’re grateful that the Oishei Foundation
has offered such generous support at this critical time,”
said Nielsen.

Cain noted that a key part of establishing an academic health
center in Buffalo will be hiring as faculty members top
physician-scientists, who bring with them clinical specialties that
the region has needed but lacked, as well as medical training
programs in important, new fields.

Locating the new medical school on the Buffalo Niagara Medical
Campus will facilitate collaborations among these highly regarded
researchers and educators and their colleagues at partner
institutions, including UB’s Clinical and Translational
Research Center, the Kaleida Health-Gates Vascular Institute,
Roswell Park Cancer Institute, John R. Oishei Children’s
Hospital and Buffalo General Medical Center.

“Such collaborations will result in advancing scientific
discoveries that respond to the critical issues we face in the 21st
century, improving patient care in our region and better preparing
our students to be global leaders,” Cain said.

UB and its supporters see the new school as providing a powerful
enhancement to health care in the Buffalo-Niagara region, one that
will raise the quality of medical students at UB and attract the
best among biomedical researchers and entrepreneurs.

The downtown facility also is expected to generate immediate and
long-term economic benefits for Buffalo. Once open, the school will
bring 2,000 UB faculty, staff and students to downtown Buffalo
daily, a sea change that will increase the population density in
the heart of the city while providing opportunities for retail and
housing development, incubators, research parks and other economic
development opportunities.

UB broke ground in October on the new medical school at Main and
High streets, a stone’s throw from its original location,
next to Buffalo General Hospital, where classes began on Feb. 24,
1847. The first decanal unit within the university, the medical
school relocated to High Street in 1893, where it remained for 60
years until 1953, when it moved to its current home on the UB South
Campus.

The John R. Oishei Foundation has been a longtime partner to UB,
supporting a broad range of projects, including biomedical
research, community outreach efforts, educational collaborations
and arts-related programs. Examples include the development of
UB’s New York State Center of Excellence in Bioinformatics
and Life Sciences, the launch of the UB Department of Biomedical
Engineering, the Interdisciplinary Science and Engineering
Partnership (with the Buffalo Public Schools and community
partners) and the Arts in Healthcare initiative.

The Oishei Foundation’s commitment has helped leverage
additional dollars from highly competitive sources, while spurring
research discoveries and advances in faculty and staff recruitment,
education and the continued development of the Buffalo Niagara
Medical Campus.

HOK, a global design, architecture, engineering and planning
firm, unveiled its design for the seven-story building in April. At
more than a half-million gross square feet, the steel-framed
building will be one of the largest constructed in Buffalo in
decades.